


Autoscopy

by TheSpaceCoyote



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Set in canon, out of body experience, spoilers for one year later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-09
Updated: 2013-08-31
Packaged: 2017-12-22 21:39:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/918319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSpaceCoyote/pseuds/TheSpaceCoyote
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What exactly was going through Carlos's mind as he was lying beside the tiny city beneath lane five, bleeding out?</p>
<p>A lot of things, as it turns out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First for real Night Vale fic. Basically, One Year Later as told from Carlos perspective with a little bit of a twist and some headcanon about the Arby's lights thrown in.
> 
> Enjoy!

Carlos never considered himself to be much of a prideful man, but to the civilization of tiny, angry people he must have looked like a titan of ego, a thing to be feared. He hadn't even meant it, he'd only wanted to show the bristling crowd that there wasn't anything to be afraid of, and in return he'd gotten--well  _something_  had happened to him. He hadn't really felt much other than little pinpricks of heat that had suddenly gotten worse, and then something wet and painful, and then his knees and hands had scraped against the side of the pit in way back into the pin retrieval area of lane five and then there hadn't been much of anything. 

But then he wakes up with his face pressed up against the slanted wall of the hole and breaths in welcome, stale air.

Once he shakily pushes himself up to his knees, he pads down the front of his body, searching for the searing wounds that he'd felt before, but there is nothing. There  _is_ blood staining his lab coat and darkening his shirt, but it's dry and deep, rusty brown and smelled of old teeth. Assured that he is most definitely  _not_  dying at the moment, he looks around. 

He rises with caution, but there's no tiny people with their tiny weapons waging their tiny war with their tiny lives on the line. The buildings are there, but they're quiet and empty. He looks up, and sees no one crowding the edge of the hole either. 

His body doesn't really feel like much of anything, and if he couldn't feel the ground under the soles of his shoes with each step he would've believed he really had been killed and is now wandering as a spirit. 

But if he isn't dead, then  _what_  is he? Where is he?

The answer to that is obvious, because everything around him looks like Night Vale, looked like how he'd left it before descending into the small city Except for the fact that he is now alone; no Teddy Williams, no eager militia, no Jeremy Godfrey sulking with a plastic, half empty cup of beer. 

Carlos scales up the side of the hole and creeps out of the pin retrieval area and out onto the smooth hardwood of the lane. All the chairs and the the pins and the beer cans and cups are undisturbed. He takes a deep breath, suddenly aware that it was the only sound he could hear outside of the rush of his own nervous heartbeat. 

He swallows, and tries to clear his thoughts. 

He wonders if maybe,  _maybe_  something else had happened to the town. That maybe, in some disturbing, cosmic way, being knocked unconscious by the vicious attack of the tiny civilization had spared him from some other terrible fate?

For a moment, something horribly sick settles in his stomach as he becomes far too conscious of the possible emptiness that surrounds him around on all sides, for miles, maybe forever. He thinks of science fiction scenarios from the books he had poured over as a child, tales of men lost in worlds where everyone else was long dead, where they were the only one left--he tried to shake these thoughts from his mind. His breathing rasps until he closes his eyes, and presses his palms into his temples. He tries to calm down and think for a moment, think of something or someone who can help him figure out what's happening. He's almost surprised at the first name that comes into his head--almost. 

_Cecil._

Cecil has proved himself to be more helpful and knowledgeable than the rest of the citizens, not that that really means much of anything. In fact, Cecil's explanations for the town's customs and phenomena never made much sense at all; still he was the only Night Vale resident who he implicitly trusted. In his own, baffling way he seemed to accept . He understood without understanding. At the very least, he could tell Carlos  _what_  was happening, even if he didn't know or bother about  _why._

Carlos exits the bowling alley still half dazed and is greeted by a dark Night Vale. The moon and the stars are open and staring above, and the streetlights pulse with a deep, soft light, but everything else in the town is devoid of light. The creeping fear returns, and he wonders if he'd really been inside the bowling alley that long, but time doesn't exactly work along logical lines in Night Vale. Whatever the cause,  he needs to talk to Cecil so he can figure out what's going on. 

He's pretty sure Cecil had been broadcasting at the time Carlos had entered the bowling alley. After a year in Night Vale, it would be remiss to  _not_  know what time the nightly broadcasts began. 

_A year_. 

Cecil had invited Carlos to some get together earlier, in honor of him and his luck in surviving in Night Vale this long (he presumed). To be honest, he'd found the whole thing to be pretty embarrassing, but Cecil tended to be pretty theatrically with all things regarding Carlos. Cecil always put him in the spot light which made him stammer and lose track of everything but his nervous hands and the sweat on the back of his neck. He'd planned to work up the nerve to head over to the station eventually, but then Teddy Williams had been making a scene, and he'd gotten frustrated and determined, and  _then_. Carlos swallows and feels a pang of guilt in his stomach, a solid little seed amidst the creeping hollow of loneliness. He tries to put it out of his mind as he crosses over to the radio station. 

He doesn't spare a thought for the well-above lethal levels of radiation that he'd previously detected around the studio. There's a dreamlike patina coating every part of his body inside and out, and he doesn't feel like the radiation could melt off his skin even if it wanted to. A year ago, he wouldn't have thought that radiation could possibly be sentient, but he'd been proved wrong of that more times than he'd liked. 

The door to the studio almost opens itself, and he follows down the darkened hallway like he's retraced these steps many many times before, as opposed to none. 

There's no noise, neither the typical sounds of heating-cooling units or fax machines nor the more abnormal ones he's gotten used to such as panicked burbling, ecstatic shrieks, or low throat-chanting.

He finds a door and stops, hand groping around the wood before it finds the knob. 

The white plastic placard on the door says nothing in any language Carlos understands, but he pushes it open anyway and it's the recording studio. 

Cecil's not there. Nothing's there, and Carlos feels his hands begin to shake. 

He had hoped, because even when clocks weren't real, when houses that existed didn't exist, when tens of people had died without anyone hardly taking notice there had always been Cecil and his show and for the first time in this whole ordeal in Night Vale Carlos truly feels like the whole crust of the earth has been torn out from underneath him to flap off into a changeable breeze. 

Carlos stumbles forward a bit, hands finding the back of the chair parked next to the faint outline of the desk. He breathes slow, trying to regain his balance. He mumbles something to himself that he doesn't understand. 

The blinds are down, but little light comes from between their slats. He wonders if the light is even just the glow of the slats themselves, imbued with some energy created by themselves or, perhaps, him. The microphone hangs heavy in the air, drawing attention to itself. 

And suddenly there's this sound that makes Carlos' bones rattle; coming from all around as he turns about wildly. 

It sounded like a dog howling underwater, and a crow choking on a marble, and the weeping cries of a lizard, and he doesn't hear it again. Carlos is not sure whether he ever really heard it at all, or if he'd just wanted to hear it and had thus created it out of the void.   

That chills his heart and he wonders if he's going to go made because everything is so silent, it's silent like the grave but  _no._

Night Vale is silent, but not silent like a grave. The town isn't dead. There's just nothing. 

Spurred by the nothing that lurks in the shadows on all sides and above and below him and inside him, too, Carlos books it out of the recording booth and winds the labyrinthine hallways, being led by his need to escape and find something, anything. 

Carlos exits the studio, hoping to get a reprieve from the obsessive dark that seemed to ensconce everything within the buildings walls but when he goes outside he looks up to find the stars only to see nothing.

No stars, no moon, no nothing, no  _light_. 

The sky yawns, literally seems to  _yawn_  like an open mouth; a lipless mouth with no tongue and nothing but a hollow throat that widens as if to swallow the whole Earth up in one fatal gulp. 

He almost takes a step back into the studio before realizing he has no where  _to_  go. 

He licks his lips, his tongue dry, and tries to think about  _what_  could have caused this. Once, Cecil had talked to him about--voidstones? Yeah, that's what he'd said. Strange objects indiscernible from simpler, less-Night Valean igneous ores and loadstones. Sometimes, they took the form of gravel, or  stray bricks, or WELCOME mats, or, Cecil had told him, playful scottish terriers. They were reported to suck the light and life out of anything they touched, leaving behind empty husks or sheer nothingness. 

He wonders, almost  _hopes_  that that's what's happened here. Hopes that maybe something catastrophic--catastrophically  _normal_ \--happened and maybe the bowling alley and the tiny city underneath and the blacking out was a delusion or a dream. It sure feels like a dream now, far off and fuzzy and receding into memories that he couldn't hardly care about at this moment. 

Like the slats on the window in the recording booth the shapes and curves and lines of Night Vale seem to give off their own deep, purplish glow despite the lack of stars and moon.  

Carlos wants to lie down and put his hands over his neck and just never do anything ever again, but he's a man of science and he's self-reliant, he needs to know. And so he wanders the silent streets, hopelessly looking for an answer.

And then suddenly the lights above Arby's are there above, still humming over the burnt out sign; Carlos doubts they'd ever left but he just hadn't seen them. He does now. He doesn't know if any force other than coincidence drew him here, but he  _is_  here. 

And because he is here he is suddenly awash with a feeling; a feeling as if he is standing on the very edge of something, something that his brain is struggling to comprehend and almost,  _almost_  will understand if he just takes that one couple steps, that leap up into the glow of the lights above the Arby's. The lights, suspended in a starless black amber; stuck in place yet glowing softly, humming darker and lighter like the drops of a candle. 

Carlos feels like he's teetering just before the event horizon of a white-hot furnace of enthalpy that will take every furrowed brow and every confused wrinkle and flatten in his brain and coat, smooth it out until he is finally able to understand  _everything_. If he takes a step and lets the light subsume him--and it's odd how he  _knows_  that's what it will do, like he knows of the formation of molecular clouds and the quantization of classical theory --then everything will make sense, and there will be an answer and an  _end_. 

It's the answer, and whatever it is, it's one-hundred feet above the Arby's and if he just takes a couple more steps he will know, he will know and understand and there will be no more searching, no more theorizing, no more danger and no more  _dying_. 

The moon and the stars wont just disappear, like they're following some physical laws that just don't make sense. Night Vale and it's incomprehensibility will be gone, will be  _understood_ , and it will be perfect. 

He'll have perfect, perfect understanding, perfect singularity with the universe or whatever it is. What it all means. It's why he came to Night Vale, why he stayed so long, he needed to understand and here it was. Right _there_. 

Carlos readies himself to take this plunge into the vast knowability that the lights promise, when he is struck by a wayward thought; that there's  _too_ much light in those droplets above the Arby's for stars. Stars couldn't very well exist without some kind of void, some kind of dark backdrop to make them standout. Stars could not  _be_ without space. And if Carlos goes he might understand what they are, why they are, but he wouldn't be able to see them. There would be no watching stars, no marveling at them on his own or maybe-- _maybe_  with somebody else and where did that thought come from?

His head is going to start leaking with the pressure of all these thoughts as he desperately tries to weigh them into a decision. Carlos presses his palms to the side of his head and screws his eyes tight. 

Something deep and instinctual inside him takes hold, and wet heat come to his eyes as his mouth whispers  _no_. 

Carlos feels hands on his shoulders, light like ghosts. They brush against his back and his shoulders, causing him to shiver. Though they are wispy, it feels as if they're simple touches are holding him in place, urging him not to go. He turns around; the echoes of the lights burn into his retinas and cause colors to pop in his vision. If there was a face behind him, he can't see it. The touches remain on his shoulder; firmer, more substantial. They tug at his lapels, guiding him back into the nothing black of Night Vale. Carlos furrows his brows, his lips parting. 

_Cecil?_

The hands on his shoulders are suddenly, shockingly solid and he feels himself shaken, physically  _shaken_  and the sudden vibration in his vision sucks away all the black and blows out the lights above the Arby's until the stained linoleum ceiling of the Desert Flower Bowling and Arcade Fun Complex simmers back into view. 

Carlos breathes. 


	2. Chapter 2

With it came his breath and a rush, a _rush_ of sound that almost knocked the air clean out of him again. He inhales and chokes on something wet and solid as pain shocks through his chest. He sits up as best as he can, breath heaving as he palms at his chest, hissing at the tender skin. 

There is blood, some of which is his but most of which isn't. The stains on his shirt and lab coat are fresh and wet. 

His breath comes in heavy, liquid gasps and his head and hands feel like it's full of buzzing gnats all pressing against his skin in their need to escape. Just as suddenly as there were no people there are far too many people, and his body is trembling like his bones can barely hold themselves together. 

Those who aren't swarming the--Carlos cranes his head up--the Apache Tracker are on him, and a concerned mummer in his ear gives identity to the person hefting him up and supporting his back with limbs that don't feel conventional. It hurts, and he moans and grits his teeth. His shirt is popped open, exposing his raw chest to the sweaty air. 

Someone else has grabbed paper napkins from the alley's snack bar and is now pressing them over the wounds and the paper is rough and it stings, but he can see when they pull away that there isn't too much blood, and progressively less as it dabs a couple more times at his skin. A man who he vaguely identifies as Teddy Williams by the greasy rat-tail hanging down his back, is etching something into the floor beside him and mumbling. Another man that Carlos does not know, balding and dressed in a teal sports jacket, stands up from the other group and shouts to Teddy that he's dead, the Apache Tracker is _dead_.  

And Carlos should be feeling sympathy or something for the man who had just saved his life at the cost of his own, even if he was still an offensive jerk, but all he could think of was how that could've probably _definitely_ almost been him, and he almost passes out again. Someone catches him and supports his back, murmuring husky encouragement into his ears. 

His hands are sticky, and maybe it's because of the blood and maybe it's because of the tacky resin on the lane of the bowling alley. He plants his palms firmly on the floor, trying to steady both his body and his thoughts. A hand squeezes on his upper arm, and he barely registers it. 

"Thank God," comes a voice from behind him, the same voice that had been murmuring to him early, which belongs to a dark-skinned man dressed in yellow flannel and a quartz bolo tie, "You should've heard Cecil…never in all my years…never want to hear that again. I don't know what any of us would do if he…hope someone's told him."

Carlos' breath hitches. Oh, god. _Cecil_. 

Carlos pads his pockets, despairing to find them empty, but the stranger behind him holds out his hand and produces Carlos phone. 

Carlos looks up, nodding in gratitude. He presses the phone on, swallowing. 

His fingers hesitate--but then he thinks of the cold nothing, the animalian scream, the lights above the Arby's and the ghostly hands and his fingers pressed the button independent of his anxious brain. He types out a quick message and before he can stop himself he presses SEND and manages to get up with the help of the stranger. 

"I have to…I have to go."

He doesn't wait to get a response from either the strange or anyone else, he just stumbles out into the parking lot shaking off the urging hands that beckon him to set down and despite the 

His car is exactly where he had left it, squatting quiet in the corner underneath the bowling alley's big metal sign. He's relieved to find his keys still sitting undisturbed in his pocket. The interior of his car has not changed since he left it hours ago, but somehow everything seems so _new_. The gear shift bristles as he grasps it and pushes his car into drive, the windshield yields with a new clarity, the headlights illuminate so much while keeping so much more hidden in the inky dark. 

The night sky is brilliant, and there's the moon, the moon in all the _inexplicable_ moon-ness. A big eye that's watching, always watching and Carlos feels like everything in Night Vale is watching him too as he makes his way through Night Vale before pulling into the parking lot of the Arby's.

He parks and exits, taking a moment to breath in all the scents and sounds; the dust in the air, the quiet cawing of the wind, the far off _booms_ and crackles that have never been explained but always serve to punctuate the desert night.  

Cecil isn't there yet, so Carlos settles on the trunk of his car, his feet swaying above the bumper as he looks up. 

He must look like a mess. His shirt and lab coat are filthy; stained with blood and littered with burnt holes and tears. That perfect hair that he knows Cecil loves is mussed and thick with sweat. He's haggard and out of breath and still hurting, still aching from the burns and wounds in his skin.  

But Cecil arrives shortly, and he's a mess too. His hair is frazzled and out of place, his glasses are smudged, and his eyes are red. They're messes together, and that feels all right. 

Lost, and tousled, and okay with all of that. 

He hesitates for only a moment when placing his hand on Cecil's knee, rubbing the crinkled slacks with his thumb and saying nothing. Cecil's body shifts in response; he leans over and rests his head on Carlos shoulder and this is hardly as awkward as Carlos had feared it would be. 

The lights burn white-blue and steam down like military flares frozen in the air. They twinkle in their purity and taunt with their mystery; a mystery that Carlos somehow understands, maybe. It doesn't matter. 

This time, he doesn't hesitate before covering Cecil's hand with his, not daring to squeeze it or lace their fingers; but just letting it lay there is enough, more than enough. Cecil rests his head against Carlos shoulder, and the sigh melts into his skin as readily as Cecil does. 

He can't even begin to understand the lights above the Arby's, and somehow, that's wonderful. Somehow, that means that he really _does_ understand. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this finished kind of lamely, I wanted to work on other things but I always just wanted to get this finished up...hope it's all right!
> 
> Thanks for reading :)


End file.
